Bubble tea has long been a part of Asian-American youth culture.
Today, bubble tea is more popular than ever before. Did you see the Google doodle recently?
Most people know that bubble tea came to America from Taiwan. But
its origins within Taiwan are infamously murky.
In this long … long delayed video, we are going to talk about bubble tea and where it comes from.
## What is Bubble Tea?
What is Bubble Tea? Bubble tea is …
Okay, is this actually necessary? Do you really need me to define bubble tea to you?
Fine, whatever. In its purest form, bubble tea is made from a combination of black tea,
milk, sugar, and tapioca pearls (粉圓).
Stir it together. You then drink it and chew the pearls and it all tastes nice. Okay?
The Taiwanese have a name for the pearls’ gummy, bouncy chewiness: Q, or QQ.
Bubble tea pearls are not the only foods with the Q. Taiwanese can describe sesame doughnuts,
glutinous rice balls (湯圓), and even fish balls as being Q.
On the whole, it is a desired trait in Taiwanese cuisine.
Why call it Q? The New York Times suggests that it comes from the
Taiwanese Hokkien word k’iu - meaning "wavy, curvy, bendy". Which is as good a guess as any.
Your standard boba drink just has the pearls and plenty of people enjoy it that way. But
today's drink shops offer many variants and spins on the original formula.
There is cheese tea, where the tea is topped with a layer of creamy,
cheesy milk foam. Quite popular in Hong Kong.
Brown sugar milk tea, where you swirl in caramelized brown sugar syrup into
the drink. There is a popular store here in Taiwan making this called Tiger Sugar.
I saw a huge line for it when I was visiting in the Philippines.
Taro milk tea, which blends in taro powder or chunks of taro itself. Taro
is a starchy root vegetable often used in Taiwanese cuisine. Taro
milk tea has some nice texture to it. And so on. I can go on forever.
## The Balls
The tapioca pearls are the eponymous boba (波霸), bubbles or just, balls.
I will use the various terms interchangeably throughout this video. Though I should note
that in Taiwan the word "boba" is slang for big breasts - coined as
such by a savvy teahouse owner. I don’t recommend saying it out loud there.
The primary ingredient in these chewy tapioca pearls is cassava starch - sometimes also known
as tapioca flour. It makes up about 74% of the final product with most of the rest being water.
Secondary ingredients include cornstarch. We can also add sweeteners like honey for
extra flavor and coloring. Black colored balls have black sugar added to them.
## Cassava
The cassava starch for the balls is extracted from the roots of the cassava plant.
Cassava - sometimes also referred to manioc or yuca - is a short,
shrubby plant about 1 to 1.5 meters tall.
The plant is well known for its sturdiness. It is quite tolerant of drought and can
grow in all types of soils. This has made cassava a major crop for hard
times - though its lack of protein means that you should not eat it exclusively.
You do not have to do much with the plant to get some cassava root. But like with
all things in life, you will get much more out of it if you put more into it.
The roots are ready for harvesting after about 10-12 months. You harvest
it by cutting the stem about 40-60 centimeters above the ground and
then pulling the thing out of the dirt. One plant gives you about 3-10 roots.
Please do not eat the cassava root right out of the ground. Because first,
the roots have a lot of dirt and rocks on them, yuck.
And also, the roots have hydrogen cyanide inside them. Which makes
them only slightly less toxic than Twitter or the YouTube comments section.
The minimum lethal dose for humans is about 0.5 to 3.5 milligrams. Poisoning
cases after big cassava meals have been reported in the Nigerian press.
And even non-lethal doses can result in irreversible spastic
paraparesis - otherwise known as the partial paralysis of the legs.
There are "sweet" cassava variants that have been bred to have almost an eighth of the cyanide
content. But for the most part, we need to process the raw cassava plant before we can eat it.
## Cassavian History
The plant originates from Latin America.
Genetic histories have traced its ancestry to wild populations in the southern border
of the Amazon basin. It was probably domesticated there with no traces of cross-breeding detected.
Indigenous populations have been growing and eating it for at least 4,000 years.
They were the ones who first discovered how to remove the plant's toxicity and make it edible.
The conquistadores and traders of the Old World stumbled across it
and recognized it to be a useful food crop. In the 16th century
they took it to Africa where it grew in popularity throughout the 19th century.
Today, Africa grows over half of the world's supply. Nigeria
is the world's leading producer with 21% share.
From Africa, cassava then made its way to Asia where it became a cash crop. Farmers discovered
that it grew well in Southern India, the Philippines, and the island of Java in Indonesia.
## Making Balls
Roots are highly perishable and so they are left in the ground until ready.
They are sent to the factory about 24 hours after harvest where we clean off the dirt
and rocks on the roots. After that, we peel and slice them into 1-2 centimeter chunks.
We then use a saw-toothed rasper to turn the cassava chunks into a wet and pulpy slurry.
This slurry is then fed through a series of filters and extractors to pull out fibrous pulp,
sand and other unclean materials. The goal is to be left with the purest starch possible.
Once all that is done, the slurry is now a semi-moist starch cake. We push
that through a dewatering filter at high-pressure
to remove as much water as possible in order to create a dry starch powder.
Not all the starch is used for making boba. You can use it to make a wide variety of things from
animal feed to ethanol to organic acids to MSG to alcohol. Did I say alcohol twice? Whoops.
But let us go back to producing the pearls. This process is largely automated. First,
machines blend and evenly mix together the starch powder and its other ingredients.
Next is a step called forming or rounding. A forming machine rolls the mixed and blended
powders into balls. You can also do this by hand too if you wish.
After that, many industrial manufacturers run their balls through screens to separate
them by size. Certain shops sell drinks with mini-pearls, which have their own fandom as well.
Then finally, we vacuum-seal the cassava starch balls into packages. We prepare
the pearls for consumption by soaking and then boiling them in water until the water
has largely evaporated. They can be used for about six months after their production date.
## Desserts
There is a story told at the Kili Bay Bubble Tea Cultural Park.
It claims that the Taiwanese prefectural government first
produced tapioca pearls in the Qing Dynasty era.
To celebrate the birthday of the Empress Dowager Cixi,
the government produced traditional Chinese glutinous rice ball desserts but with tapioca
flour. The concoction was presented to Cixi, who apparently liked and praised it.
I have also seen a similar variant of this story which changes the
celebratory event from Cixi's birthday to the traditional Chinese Lantern festival.
Seems fairly plausible. However, I would note that populations in southeast Asia
have long been enjoying jelly desserts made from native starches like sago palm.
Sago pearls, for instance. These are naturally white jelly treats made
from wet sago. They are often colored pink for aesthetic purposes and have
a similar taste to tapioca pearls. Well, they both taste like nothing.
It seems more plausible to me that Taiwan's tapioca pearls arrived to Taiwan from Southeast
Asia as sago pearls, rather than as a variant of Chinese glutinous rice balls.
Two researchers at Academia Sinica in their book on the history of Taiwanese cuisine then
note that in the 1700s, Taiwanese found it too expensive to import sago for sago pearls.
So they switched to using the starch of sweet potatoes - which were first
introduced to Taiwan some time in the 1500s - to produce the pearls,
adding tapioca starch to keep them from sticking together.
These white-colored pearls were larger than today's tapioca pearls but nevertheless were
popular for a long time - often enjoyed in sweet iced water as a traditional dessert.
The Taiwanese-Japanese dictionary produced during the Japanese colonial
period includes the word "feng yuan" (粉圓) as “powder balls” you enjoy for dessert.
Then at some point in the 1960s, new variants of sweet potato starch gave
their starch balls a chewier texture and an attractive brownish color. Thus,
eventually coming to the boba that we enjoy today.
## Milk Tea
The Chinese invented tea and have been drinking it for thousands of years.
However, they did not invent milk tea as we know it today. Certain nomadic populations like the
Mongols in China's northwest area did add milk and fat to their tea, but that stuff is salty.
The sweet milk tea that we now associate with bubble tea comes from the British,
who were the first to popularize the adding of milk and sugar to their breakfast tea.
I read that this practice comes in one part from long-standing British
traditions centered on dairy products like milk and cheese.
And in another part from the shoddiness of British porcelains. Adding boiling
tea to such porcelain would cause it to break. So the British added
milk to prevent damage to the cup. Not sure how credible that story is.
Milk tea quickly became popular across Europe - driving the colonization of sugar cane areas
like the West Indies to fuel it. And from there it entered Taiwan and Hong Kong.
It makes up a particularly big part of the Hong Kong cuisine,
with the lower classes adopting Hong Kong-style milk tea as a way to emulate the higher classes.
## Bubble Tea
So throughout this video we have traced back the histories of the bubble and the tea.
Now it is time for our two protagonists to meet.
We got to put the bubbles into the tea. But who first came up with this idea?
Two teahouses in Taiwan claim to have been the original inventor of
the bubble tea drink. Both of their origin stories have significant inconsistencies.
## Chun Shui Tang
The first and most widely accepted origin story
comes out of Chun Shui Tang (春水堂), a chain of teahouses headquartered in Taichung.
The shop's founder, Liu Han-Chieh (劉漢介), visited Japan where he saw
coffee being served cold. He decided that the Taiwanese might like it too.
Thus in 1983, he opened up a teahouse in Taichung serving Chinese tea in a similar
fashion - cold. This was different from that of traditional Chinese teahouses,
which served their tea warm or hot.
Anyway, the story goes that one day in the late 1980s,
the shop's manager Lin Hsiu-hui (林秀慧) - then in her twenties - brought some black-colored
starch balls - the aforementioned dessert "feng yuan" - to a boring business meeting.
During the meeting, she threw a few balls into her iced Assam tea - a variant of black
tea grown in India. The result was quite good, spurring the company to start selling
it. It outsold their other iced teas at the time and the rest is history.
## Hanlin
The alternate bubble tea creation story comes from the Hanlin Teahouse (翰林) in Tainan.
Hanlin's founder was Tu Tsung-ho (涂宗和). After leaving the Taiwanese army,
he became a street painter and sold paintings for a living.
So in 1986, he founded Hanlin Teahouse, borrowing money from a friend to set up a
store. Back then it was very small - just 18 square meters large - and mostly sold
hot pot. But Tu was obsessed with tea, particularly Taiwan's high mountain tea.
In 1987, Tu visited the Yamuliu vegetable market (鴨母寮市場) in Tainan. There,
he bought pearl sago - the smaller white-colored pearls made from sago starch - from a vendor.
Finding them unpleasant by themselves, he mixed these balls into a glass of milk
tea on a whim and found the result to look and taste quite good. Thus, he started selling it.
The product sold very well, far beyond the pearl sago vendor's ability to supply them
so Tu switched to black-colored, cassava-based tapioca pearls.
Hanlin still sells drinks with both the white
and black colored pearls. They call it the "panda" bubble tea and it's great.
## Court Battle
Chun Shui Tang and Hanlin Teahouse have long been at odds over who created bubble tea.
There are holes in both stories. Hanlin has pointed out before that
in Chun Shui Tang's first story, it wasn’t the business manager Lin who
first threw the balls into the tea at the meeting but rather, founder Liu Han-chieh.
Second, it is not exactly clear when the famous business meeting exactly happened. CNN
says that it happened in 1988, but there are other variants of the story citing 1986 or even 1987.
Lin for her part clarifies that she had been adding dessert Feng Yuan to
iced tea for a long time before that fateful business meeting. She purchased
Feng Yuan in 1984 when she worked as the teahouse's procurement manager.
In 1985, she started adding Feng Yuan to her tea for whatever reason and enjoyed
it as her "secret drink". When she became manager in 1986, she added it to the menu
as "bubble tea". I personally feel that the meeting probably never actually happened.
The concept is not difficult to copy and thus many copied it. Liu Han-Chieh for his part
decided not to patent it, feeling that it would be better if everyone promoted the drink together.
Lin further points out that Liu and Hanlin founder Tu were friends. As I mentioned,
Hanlin started off as a hot pot shop. Shortly after bubble tea's introduction,
Liu invited Tu over to Taichung to try out this new drink. You get what she is implying.
Anyway, the two companies actually battled it out in the courts over
who deserves credit for the drink - presenting various legal or historical
documents to support their side of the case. The legal back-and-forth lasted for years.
Finally, the Taiwan courts ruled that bubble tea is a product that
cannot be patented since anyone can make or store it. Therefore,
its true inventor is not worth arguing about. In other words, they said to get over it.
Chun Shui Tang and founder Liu Han-Chieh have long since moved
on. Hanlin Teahouse for their part agrees that the true inventor does not
matter. Both companies continue to market themselves as the inventor of bubble tea.
Tu Zhonghe recently passed away in 2022 due to COVID complications. Rest in peace to a legend.
I have to note that most local Taiwanese do not go to either Chun Shui Tang or
Hanlin for their daily bubble tea fix. These teahouses are higher-end
premium locales for drinking and dining. Also big tourist traps.
## Popularity
Bubble tea quickly spread out of Taiwan.
Taiwanese immigrants then brought it to the United States and Canada,
featuring it in their tea houses and restaurants.
The first mention of it I can dig up in American newspapers was October 1996,
calling "bubble iced tea" a frosty thirst-quencher.
In 1999, a Vancouver paper quotes an anonymous Taiwanese-Canadian who says she first came across
bubble tea 3-4 years ago back in Taipei. It was a popular drink there for teenagers.
Shortly thereafter in 2000, media mentions of the drink - and people's
craze for it - rapidly begin increasing. These bubble teas had the tapioca pearls,
freshly brewed Assam or black tea, as well as some fruit juice.
I don't think this variant gained a lot of traction at first. Up until 2005,
the most common boba shop was probably either Quickly's or Lollicup - which
prepared their teas using flavored powder.
But since then you have had additional store brands like Gongcha and Boba Guys. Many of
these shops are founded by Americans rather than immigrants and use other types of ingredients.
Some of these larger chains like Sharetea - my mom's favorite - and
Kung Fu Tea are far larger in the United States than in Taiwan. Kung
Fu Tea has over 250 locations and I have only seen one in Taipei.
## Shang Dao Food
Bubble tea is one of Taiwan's most significant food exports.
Bloomberg recently did a fantastic article on the bubble tea (珍珠奶茶) trend.
In it, they mentioned one of the biggest companies producing the bubbles - Shang Dao Food (上島食品).
They have an English-language subsidiary called Kili Bay.
Founded in 1979 by Chen Chia-Sheng (陳家昇), the company started out as a coffee importer. Over
time, they latched onto the bubble tea trend and have factories in both Taiwan and Mainland China.
They not only provide the raw goods, but also offer a complete business
model delivery. As in they will teach you how to run a bubble tea shop of your own.
I am told that they provide a majority of the starch balls for the American
bubble tea industry. I haven't quite found any information to confirm that,
but they do seem to be a very significant supplier.
Their reported daily average tapioca pearl production is 300 tons each day.
## Conclusion
This video has gotten long. You can drink a whole lot of bubble teas throughout the whole thing.
To conclude, the concept of bubble tea is quite simple. But its ingredients have a long
history. The whole thing is a fascinating mix of Western, Southeast Asian, and Chinese cultures.
They all had to come together in a single place in order to
make magic happen. And it is indeed magic. Now I am going to get a boba.